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There was the cycle of the mineral, the rock. There was the cycle of the plant. And now we are in the cycle of the animals coming to the end of that and beginning the cycle of the human being.

When we get into the cycle of the human being, the highest and greatest powers that we have will be released to us.
They will be released from that light or soul that we carry to the mind. But right now we’re coming to the end of the animal cycle and we have investigated ourselves and learned what it is to be like an animal on this earth.

At the beginning of this cycle of time, long ago, the Great Spirit came down and He made an appearance and He gathered the peoples of this earth together they say on an island which is now beneath the water and He said to the human beings, “I’m going to send you to four directions and over time I’m going to change you to four colors, but I’m going to give you some teachings and you will call these the Original Teachings and when you come back together with each other you will share these so that you can live and have peace on earth, and a great civilization will come about.”

And he said, “During the cycle of time I’m going to give each of you two stone tablets. When I give you those stone tablets, don’t cast those upon the ground. If any of the brothers and sisters of the four directions and the four colors cast their tablets on the ground, not only, will human beings have a hard time, but almost the earth itself will die.”

And so he gave each of us a responsibility and we call that the Guardianship.

To the Indian people, the red people, he gave the Guardianship of the earth. We were to learn during this cycle of time the teachings of the earth, the plants that grow from the earth, the foods that you can eat, and the herbs that are healing so that when we came back together with the other brothers and sisters we could share this knowledge with them. Something good was to happen on the earth.

To the South, he gave the yellow race of people the Guardianship of the wind. They were to learn about the sky and breathing and how to take that within ourselves for spiritual advancement. They were to share that with is at this time.
To the West He gave the black race of people the Guardianship of the water. They were to learn the teachings of the water which is the chief of the elements, being the most humble and the most powerful.

To the North He gave the white race of people the Guardianship of the fire. If you look at the center of many of the things they do you will find the fire. They say a light bulb is the white man’s fire. If you look at the center of a car you will find a spark. If you look at the center of the airplane and the train you will find the fire. The fire consumes, and also moves. This is why it was the white brothers and sisters who began to move upon the face of the earth and reunite us as a human family.

And so a long time passed, and the Great Spirit gave each of the four races two stone tablets. Ours are kept at the Hopi Reservation in Arizona at Four Corners Area on 3rd Mesa.
I talked to people from the black race and their stone tablets are at the foot of Mount Kenya. They are kept by the Kukuyu Tribe.

I once had the honor of presenting a sacred pipe at the Kukuyu Tribe carved from the red pipe stone of Mount Kenya. I was at an Indian spiritual gathering about 15 years ago. A medicine man from South Dakota put a beaded medicine wheel in the middle of the gathering. It had the four colors from the four directions; He asked the people, “Where is this from?” They said, “Probably Montana, or South Dakota, maybe Seskatchewan.” He said, “This is from Kenya.” It was beaded just like ours, with the same color.

The stone tablets of the yellow race of people are kept by the Tibetans, in Tibet. If you went straight through the Hopi Reservation to the other side of the world, you would come out in Tibet. The Tibetan word for “sun” is the Hopi word for “moon” and the Hopi word for “sun” is the Tibetan word for “moon”.
The guardians of the traditions of the people of Europe are the Swiss. In Switzerland, they still have a day when each family brings out its mask. They still know the colors of the families, they still know the symbols, some of them. I went to school with some people from Switzerland at the University of Washington and they shared this with me.

Each of these four peoples happen to be people that live in the mountains.

In 1976 America had its bicentennial celebrating 200 years of freedom. Some of the Native people thought this was significant and they carried a sacred pipe bundle from the West Coast to the East Coast of this land.

They said that the roads of this land should either go North-South or East-West. If they went North-South we would come together as brothers and sisters, but if they went East-West there would be destruction and almost the earth itself would have a hard time. So you all know the roads went East-West.
They said then things would be lost from the East to the West and from the South to the North and that they would come back again from the West to the East and from the North to the South.

So nine years ago in 1976 from the West to East Coast of this land, from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. people carried a sacred pipe bundle by hand, on foot. My aunt had dreamt 15 years ago that people that didn’t like them would throw rocks and bottles at that pipe bundle as they carried it across the land. And sure enough that came about. But, as was in my aunt’s dream, the rocks only came so close and then they dropped, and nothing touched it.

They said a spiritual fire would be lit in the North and would come down the Northwest Coast of this land. When it gets to the Puget Sound, it would go inland. I think this, nine years later, is the gathering in the North, myself. That’s why I came here. This is it. We have the capacity to start the spiritual fire now, here. The old people long ago saw it and foretold it and I’m going to come to that.

So we went through this cycle of time and each of the four races went to their directions and they learned their teachings.
We were given a sacred handshake to show when we came back together as brothers and sisters that we still remembered the teachings. It was indicated on the stone tablets that the Hopis had that the first brothers and sisters that would come back to them would come as turtles across the land. They would be human beings, but they would come as turtles.
So when the time came close the Hopis were at a special village to welcome the turtles that would come across the land and they got up in the morning and looked out at the sunrise. They looked out across the desert and they saw the Spanish Conquistadores coming, covered in armour, like turtles across the land. So this was them. So they went out to the Spanish man and they extended their hand hoping for the handshake but into the hand the Spanish man dropped a trinket.
And so word spread throughout North America that there was going to be a hard time, that maybe some of the brothers and sisters had forgotten the sacredness of all things and all the human beings were going to suffer for this on the earth.
So tribes began to send people to the mounds to have missions to try to figure out how they could survive. At that time there were 100,000 cities in the Mississippi Valley alone, called the mound civilization: cities built on great mounds. Those mounds are still there. If you ever go out to Ohio or the Mississippi Valley, they’re tourist attractions now. There was 100,000 cities of Native people and they were wondering how they could survive.

They began to try to learn to live off the land because they knew a hard time was going to come. They began to send people to have visions to see how we could survive this time.
People came on the east coast and they went across this land to the east and they were told in the prophecies that we should try to remind all the people that would come here of the sacredness of all things. If we could do that, then there would be peace on earth. But if we did not do that, when the roads went clear from east to west, and when the other races and colors of the Earth had walked clear across this land, if by that time we had not come together as a human family, the Great Spirit would grab the earth with his hand and shake it.
And so if you read the treaty negotiations from Red Jacket of the Six Nations on the east coast of this land clear to Chief Joseph and Chief Seattle on the west coast of this land, they all said the same thing. Chief Joseph said, “I accord you the right, and I hope you accord me the right, to live in this land.” Always we were trying to live together. But instead of living together, you all know there was separation, there was segregation. They separated the races: they separated the Indians, and they separated the blacks.

So when they got to the west coast of this land the elders that were made aware of these prophecies said they would then begin to build a black ribbon. And on this black ribbon there would move a bug. And when you begin to see this bug moving on the land, that was the sign for the First Shaking of the Earth.
The First Shaking of the Earth would be so violent that this bug would be shaken off the earth into the air and it would begin to move and fly in the air. And by the end of this shaking this bug will be in the air around the world. Behind it would be a trail of dirt and eventually the whole sky of the entire earth would become dirty from these trails of dirt, and this would cause many diseases that would get more and more complicated. So the bug moving on the land, of course it’s easy to see now.
In 1908 the Model-T Ford was mass produced for the first time. So the elders knew the First Shaking of the Earth was about to come about – that’s the First World War. In the First World War the airplane came into wide usage for the first time. That was that bug moving into the sky. And so they knew something very important would happen.

There would be an attempt to make peace on earth on the west coast of this land and so the elders began to watch for this. They began to hear that there was going to be a League of Nations in San Francisco so the elders gathered in Arizona around 1920 or so and they wrote a letter to Woodrow Wilson. They asked if the Indian people could be included in the League of Nations.

At that time the United States Supreme Court had held that a reservation is a separate and semi-sovereign nation, not a part of the United States but protected by it. This became a concern because people didn’t want the reservations to become more and more separate. They didn’t want them to be considered nations. So they did not write back and the Native people were left out of the League of Nations, so that circle was incomplete.
In the League of Nations circle there was a southern door, the yellow people; there was a western door, the black people; there was a northern door, the white people; but the eastern door was not attended. The elders knew that peace would not come on the earth until the circle of humanity is complete, until all the four colors sat in the circle and shared their teachings, then peace would come on earth.

So they knew things would happen. Things would speed up a little bit. There would be a cobweb built around the earth, and people would talk across this cobweb. When this talking cobweb, the telephone, was built around the earth, a sign of life would appear in the east, but it would tilt and bring death. It would come with the sun.

But the sun itself would rise one day not in the east but in the west. So the elders said when you see the sun rising in the east and you see the sign of life reversed and tilted in the east, you know that the Great Death is to come upon the earth, and now the Great Spirit will grab the earth again in His hand and shake it and this shaking will be worse than the first.
So the sign of life reversed and tilted, we call that the Swastika, and the rising sun in the east was the rising sun of Japan. These two symbols are carved in stone in Arizona. When the elders saw these two flags, these were the signs that the earth was to be shaken again.

The worse misuse of the Guardianship of the fire is called the “gourd of ashes”. They said the gourd of ashes will fall from the air. It will make the people like blades of grass in the prairie fire and things will not grow for many seasons. I saw on television not too long ago that they were talking about the atomic bomb, the gourd of ashes. They said it was the best-kept secret in the history of the United States. The elders wanted to speak about it in 1920.

They would have spoken of it and foretold it’s coming if they could have entered into the League of Nations.
The elders tried to contact President Roosevelt and ask him not to use the gourd of ashes because it would have a great effect on the earth and eventually cause even greater destruction and a the Third Shaking of the Earth, the Third World War. I’ll get to that in a few minutes.

So they knew after the Second Shaking of the Earth when they saw the gourd of ashes fall from the sky then there would be an attempt to make peace on the other side of this land. And because the peace attempt on the west coast had failed, they would build a special house on the east coast of this Turtle Island, and all the nations and peoples of the earth would come to this house and it would be called the House of Mica and it would shine like the mica on the desert shines.

So the elders began to see they were building the United Nations made out of glass that reflects like the mica on the desert so they knew this was the House of Mica and all the peoples of the earth should go to it. So they met and talked about this.

They said that in the 1920’s they had written and they had not been responded to, so they said this time we better go to the front door of the House of Mica because things might get a lot worse.

So elders representing a number of tribes I believe drove to New York City. When the United Nations opened they went to the front door of the House of Mica and they said these words:
” We represent the indigenous people of North America and we wish to address the nations of the Earth. We’re going to give you four days to consider whether or not we will be allowed to speak.”

They retreated to one of the Six Nations Reserves in New York State. The Six Nations Reserves are keepers of the Great Law of Peace of the prophet that appeared here in North America, Dagonnorida. And this Law of Peace is still recited, it takes four days between sunrise and noon. Each year an Indian, by memory, must recite it about this time of year.

Four days later they came back and I believe the nations of the earth heard that the Indians had come to the door. And they voted to let the Indians in. They wanted to hear what they had to say. But the United States is one of five nations of the United Nations with a veto power and still they were concerned because this time the Native sovereignty was even stronger. And I believe they vetoed the entrance of the Native people.
So then they knew other things would happen on the Earth, and the United Nations would not bring peace on earth but there would be continuing and deepening confusion. And that the little wars would get worse. So they retreated to the Six Nations Reserve and they talked about this and they said the time is really getting close now, 1949.

They said, “We’re going to divide the United States into four sections and each year we’re going to have a gathering. We’re going to call these the ‘White of Peace Gatherings’.” They began to have these around 1950. And they authorized certain men to speak in English for the first time about these prophecies.

One that I used to listen to many times, over and over, was Thomas Benyaka. He is a Hopi man. I believe he is still living. He was authorized to speak in English about what was on the stone tablets and he has dedicated his lifetime to doing this. And they began to tell us at these gatherings, they said “In your lifetime you’re going to see things happen.”

It was strange when they said it in the 1950’s and 1960’s but now it seems very clear. But then it was unusual. They said, “You’re going to see a time in your life when men are going to become women. The Great Spirit is going to make a man on the earth. He made him a man but this man is going to say, “I know more than the Great Spirit. I’m going to change myself to be a woman:” And they will even nurse children. The Great Spirit is going to make the woman on the earth. She’s going to say, “I know more than the Great Spirit. I want to be a man. And she will be physically a man.”

They said “You’re going to see a time in your lifetime when the human beings are going to find the blueprint that makes us.” They call that now, DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid. They said, “They re going to cut this blueprint.” They call that now, genetic splicing.

And they said, “They’re going to make new animals upon the earth, and they’re going to think these are going to help us. And it’s going to seem like they do help us. But maybe the grandchildren and greatgrandchildren are going to suffer.”
They are making new animals. The elders talked about this. They said, “You will see new animals, and even the old animals will come back, animals that people thought had disappeared. They will find them here and there. They’ll begin to reappear.”
They said (and I know many of you are from tribes that also have this prophecy, “You’re going to see a time when the eagle will fly its highest in the night and it will land upon the moon.” Some tribes say the eagle will circle the moon. Some tribes say the eagle will fly it’s highest in the night. “And at that time,” they say, “Many of the Native people will be sleeping,” which symbolically means they have lost their teachings. There are some tribes that say it will be as if they are frozen: they’ve been through the long winter.

But they say, “When the eagle flies it’s highest in the night, that will be the first light of a new day. That will be the first thawing of spring.” Of course, at the first light of a new day, if you’ve stayed up all night, you notice it’s really dark. And the first light, you want to see it, but you can’t. It sneaks up on you. You want to see it change but it’s dark and then pretty soon it’s getting light before you know it.

We’re at that time now. The Eagle has landed on the moon, 1969. When that spaceship landed they sent back the message, “The Eagle has landed.” Traditionally, Native people from clear up in the Inuit region, they have shared with us this prophecy, clear down to the Quechuas in South America. They shared with us that they have this prophecy. When they heard those first words, “The Eagle has landed,” they knew that was the start of a new time and a new power for Native people. There was absolutely nothing strong before us now. We may do anything we wish.

In 1776 when the United States Government printed the dollar, in one claw [of the eagle], if you’ve ever noticed, there is an olive branch in this claw. They said that represented peace. The Indian elders shared with me in South Dakota that to them that represents the enslavement of black people.

In the prophecies of the Six Nations people they say there will be two great uprisings by black people to free themselves. We’ve seen one about 1964. There will be a second, more violent one to come. I’ll get back to what that means in a minute. In the other claw is 13 arrows. The founding fathers of the United States said that represents the 13 States. But the elders say that represents the enslavement of the Native people.

When the Eagle landed on the moon, they decided to print a special silver dollar to commemorate that. I don’t know how many of you noticed it. The original design showed the spaceship landing on the moon but at the last minute it was changed to an actual eagle. And in the eagle’s claws is the olive branch, but the arrows are gone. The elders said, “That’s our prophecy, we have been released.”

There was one more uprising coming for the black race of people and then they will be released and this is also going to have an effect on Native people, a good effect. There’s a whole new set of prophecies from the Iroquois people about that and I won’t have time to go into that this morning.

But we’re in that time now. We’re between the first light of a new day and the sunrise. The sunrise is about to come and when it comes up everyone is going to see it. But you know how it is in the village there’s a few people that get up early, and there are some that sleep until noon. I’m probably one of those that sleeps until noon. They said when that Eagle lands on the moon, the powers will begin to come back to us.
Within seven days of the time the Eagle landed on the moon, the Freedom of Indian Religion Act was introduced into the United States Congress. The legislation was introduced in 1969, less than seven days after the Eagle landed on the moon. Eventually it was passed in November of 1978, signed by President Carter. These are the physical manifestations of the spiritual prophecies that we have.

So he said at this time you’re going to see that things will speed up, that people on the earth will move faster and faster. Grandchildren will not have time for grandparents. Parents will not have time for children. It will seem like time is going faster and faster. The elders advised us that as things speed up, you yourself should slow down. The faster things go, the slower you go. Because there’s going to come a time when the earth is going to be shaken a third time.

The Great Spirit has been shaking the earth two times: the First and Second World Wars to remind us that we are a human family, to remind us that we should have greeted each other as brothers and sisters. We had a chance after each shaking to come together in a circle that would have brought peace on earth, but we missed that.

Tonight they were talking on the news about the sign for the Third Shaking of the Earth. I heard it while sitting in the airport after I missed my plane. They said they’re going to build what the elders called the “house in the sky”.

In the 1950’s they talked about this: they will build a house and throw it in the sky. When you see people living in the sky on a permanent basis, you will know the Great Spirit is about to grab the earth, this time not with one hand, but with both hands.
Many of you of Native background may have heard “the spirits will warn you twice, but the third time you stand alone.” We’ve had two warnings, the first two World Wars, but now we stand alone in the third one. As it says in the Baha’i Writings, there will be no-one protected. When this house is in the sky, the Great Spirit is going to shake the Earth a third time and whoever dropped that gourd of ashes, upon them it is going to drop.

They say at that time there will be villages in this land so great that when you stand in the villages you will not be able to see out, and in the prophecies these are called “villages of stone”, or “prairies of stone”. And they said the stone will grow up from the ground and you will not be able to see beyond the village. At the center of each and every one of these villages will be Native people, and they will walk as “hollow” shells upon a “prairie of stone”. They said “hollow shells” which means they will have lost any of their traditional understandings; they will be empty within.

They said after the Eagle lands on the moon some of these people will begin to leave these “prairies of stone” and come home and take up some of the old ways and begin to make themselves reborn, because it’s a new day. But many will not. And they said there’s going to come a time when in the morning the sun is going to rise and this village of stone will be there, and in the evening there would just be steam coming from the ground. They will be as steam. And in the center of many of those villages of stone when they turn to steam, the Native people will turn to steam also because they never woke up and left the village.

And this used to bother me when I was a young man. I used to ask the elders, “Isn’t there anything we can do?” And they said, well, it’s just that way that if a person does not have the spiritual eyes to see, it’s very hard to show them. Or if they don’t have the ears to hear, it’s very hard to speak with them. We wish that we could go get them all but we can’t. It’s just that some are not going to wake up. But some will wake up.

And so they say there’s going to be the Third Shaking of the Earth. It’s not going to be a good thing to see but we will survive it. We will survive it. And when we survive it, then there’s going to be another attempt to make a circle of the human beings on the earth.

And this time the Native people will not have to petition to join but will be invited to enter the circle because they say the attitude towards us will have changed by then, and people will let us into the circle and all the four colors of the four directions will share their wisdom, and there will be a peace on earth. This is coming close.

A lot of times when I share this message of the prophecies, people say, “Can’t we change it? Could we stop it?”
The answer is yes.

The prophecies are always “either/or”. We could have come together way back there in 1565, and we could have had a great civilization, but we didn’t. Always along the path of these prophecies, we could have come together. We still could. If we could stop the racial and religious disharmony, we would not have to go through this third shaking.

The elders say the chance of that is pretty slim. It seems to me like it’s pretty slim, too. But they say what we can do is we can “cushion” it. The word we use is “cushion”. We can cushion it so it won’t be quite as bad. How do we do this? We do this by sharing the teaching that will reunite us.

The Hopis in their prophecies say there will be a religion that comes here. Maybe it will be true and bring unity, or maybe it will not be true and not bring unity. If it does not bring unity, a second religion will come, and the people of this religion are known in the Hopi language as the Bahani, the people of Baha. Ni means “people of”.

When I heard about these [prophecies], none of them made any sense. Now most of it has come to pass. Last I heard on the news, they said the “house in the sky” will be put up in 1996. It was going to be put up sooner, but it’s been postponed for four years. Maybe it will be postponed again. But in not too long it’s going to go up. The earth as we know it is going to change.

Each of us carry, I believe, a sacred drop of light.
But now we’re going into the human world. The mind is going to be opened up to the radiance of our own soul and the cycle of the human beings is going to come back, and something so good is going to happen on the earth that it cannot even be described.

The elders say it in different ways. They say, there will be grass at that time when they make that circle and bring the peace on earth. There will be blades of grass that have not quite come through the earth. Even they will try to push themselves up to be part of that day when the sun rises.

You know, one time the scientist came to the Hopis and they said, “We want to take a piece of the stone tablets.” They said “We want to take the stone tablets to a scientific laboratory to determine how old they are.” The Hopis said, “We know how old they are”. Well, the scientists said, “We want to confirm it.” Well, the Hopis let them take a little piece, and they did that by the carbon dating method.

Editor’s Note: This puzzles me, as stone cannot be carbon dated. Carbon 14 is taken in by organic life until the moment of death. Then the Carbon 14 is slowly released by that organic material and the rate of release can be calculated. Half-life computations tell the age of the tested material. Stone is not organic.

They found these tablets were at least 10,000 years old, maybe 50,000. So when I say, “Thousands of years ago, there were Native people that spoke of these things,” that’s exactly what I mean. They told their children and thousands of years ago, their children grew up and told their children, and then their children grew up and told their children. And they spoke about the people that will live in this time.

And now it is us. We are the ones they spoke of long ago. They say to be alive, to come into creation and to live upon the earth at this time is a great honor.

In the cycle of time, from the beginning to the end, this time we are in now will change the purification of all things. They say this is the hardest time to live, but it is also the greatest honor to be alive to live and see this.

In the state of Washington in 1855 they signed treaties and made 22 Indian reservations. They wanted to do it before there were problems. They thought they were advanced at the time, they had learned from what had happened elsewhere. They made 22 Indian reservations and the elders spoke in 1855 and they said, “We’re going to become weaker, and you are going to become stronger, and if you wish to break these treaties, you may do so.” They said, “But there’s going to come a time when the earth itself will rise up and purify itself and this will be announced.

It will be announced by the speaking of more than 16 Great Ones on the West Coast of this land. And when the 16 Great Ones speak, the purification will have begun. There was a new [?] five years ago when Mt. Saint Helens, one of the 16 great volcanoes on the West Coast of this land, “spoke”.
The Seattle Times did a special interest story. They went over to Watson Totus and Woodrow Bill. It was Woodrow Bill’s son that made this hoop that I brought here today, my good brother Randolf Bill. They asked Watson Totus and Woodrow Bill as spiritual people of the Yakuma nation, “What does this mean?” What they said was so profound that they didn’t put it on page 16, they put it on the front page of the Seattle Times.
They said, “This means that the races and nations of the earth should slow down and come together and talk to each other.” That’s exactly what it meant. And we had four years and four days to do that.

Four years and four days later, Mt. Saint Helens erupted the second time. That was last spring, just about this time. That was our grace period. We could have still done something really good. But now things are going to speed up. Now things are going to really happen fast. Time is going to go so fast.
The more we share the Message, the more we will cushion the Third Shaking of the Earth, and the easier it will be on ourselves and others.

We are now within the purification of all things. Non-Natives call this the “Apocalypse”. The Native elders call this the “Purification”.

But don’t despair. It sounds terrible, but we will survive it. We will live through it. I don’t think there’s anyone chosen to live through it, but some people will.

So, in closing I would like to call on each and every person, regardless of who you are, young or old, Native or non-Native, to arise now, and to awake, to embrace this time, to learn everything you can about the Teachings and the Writings, to arise and awake and go forth, all the peoples of the earth.
Peoples everywhere are now receptive to the Message. This year is the year when that is really going to start, I believe, myself. Arise and awake.

There’s people out there waiting to hear, waiting to hear… waiting to hear…

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On Christmas Eve 2012, the sky is divided by the sun and all dry land begins to rise. The oceans respond to the tectonic shifts and the great flooding of the Earth begins. New York is washed away by a tsunami ten times greater than the Indian Ocean wave of 2004. Chicago returns to its swamp roots as the melting ice from the North Pole quickly fills the basins of the Great Lakes, causing Lake Michigan to burst at the seams. Gravity from the North speeds up the process of course, as the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans collide in Nebraska. The new era of humanity turns from dominance to survival.
Rather then the plot for a blockbuster Hollywood summer movie, this is the way the world could end according to Western interpretation of the Long Count calendar, one of several created by the Mayan Indians who populated the Yucatan peninsulain Mexico hundreds of years ago. While many Mayans still exist today, the classical period of their culture ended around 900 A.D. They studied the stars and the movements of the moon and sun, developing several calendars including the Long Count, which measures huge periods of time, along with a calendar to mark the passing of a year.

The exact date of the ending of the Long Count calendar is Dec. 21, 2012. On that date the Last Great Cycle will come to a close. The Sun God will rule the sky, the ninth Lord of the Night. The Moon will be eight days old, and it will be the third lunation in a series of six. But what does this fascinating document actually mean? How accurate is the calendar and should we pay attention to it? Many religious aficionados predicted the end of creation to be December 31, 1999, and that story had a happy ending. Do we need to prepare for an astronomical event the equivalent of Armageddon?

The Long Count Calendar measures time in cycles of years. The current cycle, or baktun, is scheduled to end in the northern hemisphere on the winter solstice in 2012. This cycle will have lasted about 394 years, and is the last in a series of 13 baktuns, the first of which started in 3114 B.C. No one knows why the Maya marked the beginning of creation on that particular date. Every year the Sun, Earth and the Milky Way galaxy align in a particular manner in the days leading up to the winter solstice. What is special about 2012 is for the first time in 26,000 years this alignment will occur on December 21, the actual date of the winter solstice. This has led to rampant speculation that the Maya believed something catastrophic will happen. The problem is that none of these predictions were made by actual Mayans, only individuals from the West who have interpreted the calendar themselves, according to Dr. Robert Sitler, the Latin American Studies director at Stetson University in Florida.

“All of that speculation is by modern Western people who are unfamiliar with the Maya culture,” Sitler said. “If you talked to 1000 Mayans about 2012, they wouldn’t know about it.

“The (classic) Mayans simply never mentioned it once. I’m dissuaded from (the end of the world theory) because they never wrote it down anywhere”

While the Maya were accurate in charting the movements of the heavens without the benefit of telescopes, Sitler said the Long Count calendar has nothing to do with astronomy but more to do with the Maya’s theory on creation. In fact, the Maya believed in multiple creations, one of which ended with the great flooding of the Earth.

while Sitler says the dire predictions of apocalypse in 2012 are off-base, he does believe that the current state of society is in a downturn. “Will all that crazy stuff happen? No,” he said. “I think there is cause for concern when you look at the environmental situation we are in. The current lifestyle on planet Earth is unsustainable.”

In fact, Sitler said the Maya people currently living in places like Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize are learning about the 2012 prediction like other people: through the media. This has led some Maya to interpret the calendar to mean their people will return to autonomous rule. Other Maya resent what they consider to be another example of the white man taking over their culture by interpreting their own documents for them. Sitler believes nothing extraordinary will occur specifically in 2012.However, he does warn that unless changes are made regarding toxic dumping, pollution and the way we treat the environment, the end is not far off.

“The trajectory is in place and we are already in this disaster,” he said. “It will collapse, it has to. It has no choice. We desperately are trying not to see the writing on the wall. I think we’re kind of in a collective delusional state.”

Dr. Vern Scarborough is a Mayanist and professor of anthropology at the University of Cincinnati. He also warns not to read too much in the doomsday prophecy of the Long Count Calendar. “This was a society governed by rules that were very different than ours,” he said. “I think you have to be very careful when you drum up support for the end of the world just because the Maya say so.”

Scarborough said that the astronomy predictions made many years ago were often used in what today would be termed “playing politics.” Only a select group of Mayan elders studied the sky, enough to predict certain events like eclipses and the movements of planets. If an elder said an eclipse would happen and he was correct, he would then use that to his advantage when pushing for additional powers or longevity. “If things didn’t happen the way they predicted, they made them happen,” Scarborough said. “When you begin predicting eclipses, that’s a pretty heavy-duty statement. You then indicate that you are responsible for shutting out the sun. It’s a power play.”

One problem with studying the Mayan writings is many people fail to place them in the context of the time. The Maya had no way of knowing certain events like modern scholars can.

“We can be more rational because we can afford to be,” he said. The Maya couldn’t, they lived in a different world. I’m not taking away from their ability to construct this marvelous calendar. There are lessons to learn from their relationship with the landscape.

“As for myth and religion, why would you think a culture over 1,000 years ago would have a better understanding about the end of the world then we do today?”

The Maya were truly a unique civilization of people. They developed their own system of writing, and were expert mathematicians and astronomers. They lived for thousands of years in an area very difficult for human beings to inhabit. They built impressive cities, the ruins of which went undiscovered for centuries buried beneath the canopy of the jungle in Central and South America. The most famous of these cities, Chichen Itza, is located about 100 kilometers west of Cancun and visited each year by thousands of tourists who marvel at the exquisite stone construction of buildings, including the Great Ball Court, The Temple of the Warriors, and the Castillo. The Maya believed a great god, Quetzalcoatl (or “birdsnake”) resided in the city and the Castillo was a monument to the feathered serpent. Each year, during the spring and autumn equinoxes, carvings of feathered serpents located on the Castillo’s northern stair create an illusion that draws thousands of worldwide tourists. The late afternoon sunlight brings these carvings to life and as the day goes on a pattern of light and shadows gives one the impression that great diamond-backed rattlesnakes are writhing up the great stairs of the Castillo.

The progressiveness of the Mayan culture convinced a certain sector of their fan base that the Maya were actually not human at all. This line of thinking follows the concept that the Maya are in fact aliens from another planet who traveled by the light of the stars. The belief is that the Mayans will return on December 21, 2012 to transform reality. One of the curators of this theory is Jose Arguelles, author of “The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology.” Arguelles believes the Maya actually are from the star Arcturus in the Pleides cluster and materialized in Mesoamerica as “galactic agents.”

Reviews of the Pleidian theory range from polite snickering to outright dismissal. Kenneth L. Feder, author of “Frauds, Myths and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology”, writes “there is no reference to archaeological evidence or any sort of scientific testing for the speculations made by Arguelles. The claims may seem laughable, but at this time in genuine human history, the joke isn’t funny. The specter of thousands of people waiting hopefully for some ‘planetary synchronization’ or ‘harmonic convergence’ to cure all of the ills that afflict us and our planet is ultimately, desperately sad.”

While many Mayan scholars dismiss the end of the Last Great Cycle as pop hysteria, the fact is mainstream culture has slowly began to discover the Mayan civilization. The popular TV series the “X-Files” ended with Mulder and Scully not being abducted by predatory aliens, but because the producers deemed the Long Calendar as the ultimate X-File. The last episode depicts the end of the world in 2012, in accordance with the end of the last cycle. Mel Gibson’s new movie “Apocolypto” will hit theaters later this year, and deals with the downfall of the classic Mayan society. The characters will speak entirely in Mayan, the same language still spoken by the remaining Mayans today. Surprisingly, Scarborough is looking forward to the movie. He believes the film could have educational value if it encourages just one person to open a book about the history of the Maya and do some research.

“My colleagues might go crazy, but I’m a little more open to things,” he said. “The Maya were amazing, there’s no doubt about that. We have to be careful how far we take their beliefs.” As for what will happen on December 21, 2012, we know the planets will align and for sure, there will a lot of individuals proclaiming the end of days. But as Michael Coe, professor emeritus of anthropology at Yale University, puts it: “No one really knows what is going to happen.”

However, if we continue to turn a blind eye to such issues as pollution and global warming, we will not need a calendar to tell us the world is ending. All we will need to do is look out our window.

Spectacular new images of the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, have been released by the US space agency NASA after their capture by a new time-lapse photographic technique.

NASA has taken numerous images of the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, over the years, but these are the first “moving” images combining hundreds of still images taken from the International Space Station.

Digital cameras are providing NASA scientists with some of the clearest, highest resolution images of space they have ever seen.

One NASA scientist has turned to time-lapsed photography, stringing together digital images rather than video for images of movement in the heavens.

Earth Scientist Melissa Dawson came up with the idea late last summer when she saw images from the International Space Station taken every three seconds as the station passed along the eastern coast of North and South America.

Each of the time lapse videos requires at least 500 images to produce the sense of movement as if in a video image.

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Experiencing the Taj Mahal without being cognizant of its history is grossly irrelevant and absurd. The extravagant expression has not come easy. There underlays an ocean of emotions and a wild passion that led the king to erect such a masterpiece in snow-white marble. It’s a monument, the only one, where perhaps, ever inch of the edifice, from one corner to the other, expresses the beauty of Mumtaz Mahal. Mughal emperor‘s Shah Jahan’s intense feelings and warmheartedness can be felt at the very first instant as you arrive here to fix your gaze upon one of the most phenomenal structures in the world.

The splendid love story begins in 1612, when a Persian princess Arjumand Bano married Shah Jahan (then prince Khurram), the fifth Mughal emperor. Arjumand Bano, who later became known as Mumtaz Mahal (the Chosen of the Palace), was a second wife to the emperor. Both a companion and an advisor, the queen followed the emperor on his journeys and military expeditions. Such was the effect of the queen on his emperor-husband that Shah Jahan was inspired to perform acts of charity and benevolence all throughout his life.

The love story took a serious turn when, on a campaign at Burhanpur with her husband, Mumtaz Mahal took his last breath giving birth to their 14th child. So heartbroken was the emperor that the whole court went into mourning for a span of over two years. It is said that, within a few months after the queen’s death, the hair and beard of the king had turned white. And Shah Jahan was recklessly determined on building a monument in his consort’s loving memory that the world had never seen.

The dead body of the queen was brought to Agra and buried in a garden on the banks of river Yamuna. A group of the finest architects was assembled to devise a plan for erecting the tomb. Eventually, Ustad Isa, a Persian architect, was called upon to design the structure. The master architect along with his pupil Ustad Ahmad began the construction of the edifice. The dome, however, was fashioned by Ismail Khan. A total of 20,000 labourers from across the country and the world were employed to work for 22 years continuously. Finest of the marbles were procured from the district of Markana near Jodhpur. Precious and semi precious stones were brought from far off places.

Later, the mausoleum was provided with luxuriant furnishings. Persian carpets and gold lamps embellished the interior of the Taj. Two silver gates, that were set up at the entrance, were taken away by Suraj Mal in 1764. Amir Husein Ali Khan looted the sheet of pearls that covered the stone coffins.

It is said, that after the completion of the construction, when emperor Shah Jahan viewed the Taj, he ordered his men to cut off the right hand of the master architect Ustad Isa, so the later may not be able to erect such a stately and imposing edifice again in his life. There’s another legend that says Shah Jahan was contemplating to build yet another Taj Mahal across the river in black marble.

ESO astronomers have used the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope to capture an image of NGC 6744. This impressive spiral galaxy lies about 30 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Pavo (The Peacock). But this view could almost be a picture postcard of our own Milky Way, taken and sent by an extragalactic friend, as this galaxy closely resembles our own.

We see NGC 6744 almost face on, meaning we get a dramatic bird’s eye view of the galaxy’s structure. If we had the technology to escape the Milky Way and could look down on it from intergalactic space, this view is close to the one we would see — striking spiral arms wrapping around a dense, elongated nucleus and a dusty disc. There is even a distorted companion galaxy — NGC 6744A, seen here as a smudge to the lower right of NGC 6744, which is reminiscent of one of the Milky Way’s neighbouring Magellanic Clouds.

One difference between NGC 6744 and the Milky Way is their size. While our galaxy is roughly 100 000 light-years across, the galaxy pictured here extends to almost twice this diameter. Nevertheless, NGC 6744 gives us a tantalising sense of how a distant observer might see our own galactic home.

This dramatic object is one of the largest and nearest spiral galaxies. Although it has a brightness of about 60 billion Suns, its light spreads across a large area in the sky — about two thirds the width of the full Moon, making the galaxy appear as a hazy glow with a bright centre through a small telescope. Still, it is one of the most beautiful objects in the southern sky, and it can be identified by amateur astronomers as an oval shape contrasting with a rich background of stars.

With professional telescopes such as the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at La Silla, which captured this image, NGC 6744 can be seen in all its glory. The dusty spiral arms are home to many glowing star-forming regions (seen in red) and give this Milky Way look-alike its striking spiral form.

This picture was taken by the Wide Field Imager attached to the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The picture was created from exposures taken through four different filters that passed blue, yellow-green and red light and the glow coming from hydrogen gas. These are shown in this picture as blue, green, orange and red, respectively.

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A team of scientists from the University of Sheffield and Bangor University have used a computer climate model to study how freshwater entering the oceans at the end of the penultimate Ice Age 140,000 years ago affected the parts of the ocean currents that control climate.

A paper based on the research, co-authored by Professor Grant Bigg, Head of the University of Sheffield’s Department of Geography, his PhD student Clare Green, and Dr Mattias Green, a Senior Research fellow at Bangor University’s School of Ocean Sciences, is currently featured as an Editor’s Highlight in the journal, Paleoceanography. The study is the first of this kind for the time period.

The research found that freshwater entering the ocean from melting ice sheets can weaken the climate controlling part of the large-scale ocean circulation, with dramatic climate change as a consequence. During the period of the study, the experts noted that the global temperature dropped by up to two degrees over a few centuries, but changes were not uniform over the planet, and it took a long time for the climate to recover after the ice sheets had melted completely.

The team argues that it is not only the volume of freshwater being released from the melting ice sheet which is important but also the state of the freshwater: icebergs act to reduce the ocean circulation less than meltwater, but the effects of icebergs last for longer periods of time. The effect is similar to the difference between adding very cold water to a drink or adding an ice cube or two.

The study also shows that at the end of the more recent Ice Age 20,000 years ago, the ocean circulation was more sensitive to ice sheet collapses than during the earlier period.

Professor Grant Bigg, Head of the University of Sheffield’s Department of Geography, said: “An important component of the work is that it shows that the impact of freshwater releases from past, or future, ice masses depends critically on the form — whether fresh water or icebergs — and the location of the release.

“The Arctic has been surrounded by extensive glaciations several times in the past and this study has shown that large-scale changes in such Arctic ice sheets could affect the climate in places far from the release site. Our work also suggests that the Pacific Ocean may have been more sensitive to major changes in past glaciations than previously realised. We plan to investigate this possibility more in the future.”

Dr Mattias Green from Bangor University, added: “With meltwater- similar to adding water to your drink, the water spreads out quickly and has an immediate effect, but it is also absorbed quickly into the rest of the ocean. In a similar way to your ice cube, the icebergs drift along and melt more slowly. This means the immediate impact is weaker, but they are there for a longer time and distribute the water over a larger area.

“Our results lead us to conclude that a future ice sheet collapse, that might happen in Antarctica or Greenland, would have climatic consequences, but the exact impact needs to be evaluated in each case.”

Fifty years ago next month, a young American astronomer named Frank Drake turned a radio telescope on a nearby star and began a systematic search for messages from an alien civilisation. It was an extraordinarily daring experiment. In those days, looking for aliens was regarded as part way between pseudoscience and lunacy.

Today the mood has dramatically shifted. Over the past few months, Seti– the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – has featured prominently at scientific meetings in both the Vatican and the Royal Society, and around the world scientists are celebrating the half-century. Astronomers now estimate there could be billions of earth-like planets in our galaxy alone. But the key factor that determines whether or not we are alone in the universe remains stubbornly mysterious. That factor concerns the origin of life. Without life, there will be no alien intelligence.

Drake had assumed that if a planet resembled Earth, then life of some sort was pretty much bound to arise on it eventually. That assessment was echoed by Carl Sagan, Seti’s charismatic champion, who pointed out that no sooner was Earth ready for life than “up it popped”. If Drake and Sagan are correct, then it’s easy to imagine thousands of technological civilisations in the galaxy.

But Drake and Sagan were swimming against a huge tide of opinion from molecular biologists. Francis Crick, for example, remarked that the origin of life seemed “almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going”. The problem is that even the simplest living thing is already so stupendously complex that if such an entity were to be thrown together by chance, it would be a fluke of such magnitude as to be unlikely to happen twice in the observable universe, vast though that may be.

However, we don’t know that life’s origin was purely a chemical accident. Scientists are aware of all manner of self-organising processes that might have fast-tracked mindless molecules down a path of complexification leading to life. Indeed, that is the fashionable view. The biologist Christian de Duve expresses it splendidly with the evocative slogan that “life is a cosmic imperative”.

Unfortunately, there are few grounds for this new-found optimism. Scientists have no agreed theory of the origin of life – plenty of scenarios, conjectures and just-so stories, but nothing with solid experimental support. Life may emerge from unremarkable chemical sludge with a high degree of probability; but then again, it may not. We haven’t a clue either way. And while we are completely in the dark about precisely what it takes for life to start up, putting an estimate on the numbers of alien civilisations is pointless.

There might be a way to solve this problem at a stroke. No planet is more earth-like than Earth itself, so if life really does pop up readily in earth-like conditions, then surely it should have arisen many times right here on our home planet? And how do we know it didn’t? The truth is, nobody has looked.

Biologists think all familiar forms of life on Earth are inter-related and descended from a common ancestor. Evidence comes from the universal nature of biochemistry, and also from gene sequencing, which enables organisms to be positioned on a single tree of life. If we found a life form with a seriously weird biochemical make-up, it could point to a second genesis.

The vast majority of terrestrial species are in fact microbes, and scientists have only begun scratching the surface of the microbial realm. It is entirely possible that examples of life as we don’t know it have so far been overlooked.

If there is a second sample of life on Earth, it could constitute a sort of shadow biosphere, perhaps restricted to obscure pockets, or possibly spread all around us, interpenetrating the familiar biosphere. In the latter case, “alien” microbes might be intermingled with our own microbial relatives. They could be literally under our noses. Identifying the aliens presents a challenge, but a few scientists are finally starting to look.

If we do discover more than one type of life on Earth, we can be fairly certain that the universe is teeming with it, for it would be inconceivable that life started twice here but never on all the other earth-like planets. And once life gets going, there is least a chance that intelligence will evolve. Who knows, beings far across the galaxy may even now be wondering whether or not they are alone in the vastness of the cosmos, and trying in some way to attract our attention.